Swinburne University of Technology (Swinburne) in Melbourne has completed its IT infrastructure migration to the Microsoft Azure environment and flagged the potential for future collaboration with the tech giant.

With over 30,000 enrolled students and 9,000 staff members, the university engaged Microsoft after its IT infrastructure and the hardware it relied on were reaching their end of life in February 2022.

The migration to Azure took into account 3,000 workloads that were critical to the university’s daily operations, and assisted Swinburne in realising its mission to be a “leading digitally connected and technology enabled institution”.

It also allowed the university to wind up several legacy and outdated applications and servers, boosting the IT team to enable a smoother transition to the cloud and also allowing for major cost savings and more operational efficiency.

“Cloud migration became a high priority to achieve the kind of cybersecurity maturity we wanted,” Phil Roe, former Chief Information Officer at Swinburne, said.

“There were also other important drivers like service quality, reliability, and our ability to optimise cost and resources.

“Success for us was managing the migration securely and within the ambitious timeline. We managed to lift and shift 60 apps with little to no disruption to business operations.

“We’ve now got a key foundational piece in place by being more actively involved in having a cloud environment, which we can leverage in all sorts of directions, from data warehousing and data analytics to more hybrid arrangements.”

Swinburne also leveraged several other Microsoft services to inform the migration process and best practices on cloud adoption, including Microsoft Unified Support, Azure Migration Factory, Azure FastTrack and the Enterprise Skilling Initiative, which upskilled staff to ensure they were cloud-ready.

According to a statement from Microsoft, “Swinburne is [now] capitalising on Azure’s tangible benefits, including more reliable services and enhanced network stability. The engineering teams can refocus their resources now that they no longer need to maintain legacy systems, allowing them to tackle high-value projects and innovate in more areas”.